A Day Off!

photo by  Mike Fallenstein

On Sunday, Squash Blossom Farm  hosted  "Escape From Alcina's Island,"  a Picnic Operetta on the farm, performed by Mixed Precipitation Theater.  I was quite proud of  all the weeding and  mulching I had done to beautify the veggie gardens in preparation for staging the operetta, but as luck would have it, the day turned out to be rainy, gray and stormy, so we held the performance into the  greenhouse instead. A great crowd turned out despite the rain and the performance was a delight. KTTC-TV  featured it in the news- view here.

After the Picnic Operetta, we made wood-fired pizza t while Driven by Rhythm, one of our favorite local  bands, played music. Because of the weather and the holiday, things were a bit discombobulated, and we are indebted to friends (Zoe, Connie, Tushar) who assisted with pizza and to Richard for documenting the event (those photos coming soon.)

Monday was a holiday,  Labor Day.  I believe it was the first time in about 5 months Rog and I took a day off.  Well, we did chores, of course, and finished cleaning the barn kitchen from the previous night's pizza-making,  but we also took a little nap and then took a leisurely walk around the farm. First we admired the unusually well-weeded veggie garden.

The water in the pond has dropped to its lowest level since we dug it last November.

The arrowroot and other natives I planted along the water's edge last spring are currently high and dry, but seem to be surviving  just fine.

Lots of deer tracks around this watering hole!

The creamy bottle gentian, blue bottle gentian, and this cross of  creamy and blue that comes out pink, are at peak bloom in the prairie.

Still plenty of gnomes and fairies to be found in the forgotten fairy garden.

Sumac are looking like fall already.

Lots of both blue and white lobelia (cardinal flower) blooming in the prairie right now.

Not to mention, a sea of goldenrod. There is a small opening in the  woods where the red barn shows through.

Rog inspected the hops growing on the farm store pergola.

Just about ready to harvest.

Rog discovered three nice puffballs growing right in the  backyard - they must have  popped up after Sunday's rain.

We sliced the puffballs and sauteed them in a bit of butter with garlic, onions, tomatoes, sweet red pepper, basil and squash blossoms from the garden, and a bit of parmesan, tossed them with linguine and devoured our concoction under the patio gazebo. A delicious dinner to end to a lovely work holiday.

On the road to St. Germain

The elderflowers are blooming!  These are the umbrella-shaped blossoms of the elderberry, which grows  abundantly along country roads around here.

Pretty much every ditch has a patch of tall shrubs that look like this and smell so sweetly fragrant.

It is the leading edge of the brief elderflower season. The umbrels with  little white spheres are just in bud, not  truly flowering yet.  They will be ready in a couple of sunny days. It is interesting that one road will have  elderflowers at peak flower while another nearby will still be barely budded, extending the season.

Today, I  harvested a couple of bags of these flowers to make elderflower liqueur. Easy, snip them off into a grocery bag, However, some of the  other plants in the ditch are not so friendly --I waded through tall wild parsnip (which can cause  horrible blistery burns), prickly thistles, and lush  poison ivy to obtain my prize. I wore long pants and my muck boots. Don't harvest ALL of the flowers--you will also want there to be plenty of elderberries later this summer!

The recipe for making elderflower liqueur is very simple. Wash or shake off the  flowers to remove any insects or dust.  These blossom were so clean- I  harvested from a rural paved road after seeing how dusty the plants along the gravel road were. I only found one very tiny bug.
Remove the blossom from the stems, which purportedly  contain a toxin.  I started out snipping the flowers off with a scissors, but ended up stripping the  blossoms off the stems with my fingers. It takes a lot more umbrels than you expect, once you remove the flowers from the stems. I filled a 2-qt  mason jar with the blossoms, but you could  make any  amount.  The blossoms are then covered with vodka. I purchased  Prairie Vodka because it is sort of local (SW Minnesota) and is organic, plus it was on sale for a reasonable price. When I purchased the vodka, I asked if they sold elderflower liqueur and they do! It is a very pricey liqueur called "St. Germain. "

Steep the blossoms on in a cool dark place for a week up to month, swishing and turning the jar over over daily.  Then strain through fine cloth and add sugar to taste- about  1/4 cup sugar per quart. I am intending to try using honey from my own  bees, which will make it totally local and should add some  lovely subtle notes of raspberry and prairie flowers.

This is my first time making  elderflower liqueur, so I  don't have any more advice or insights yet--but I did find a yummy-sounding recipe for Elderflower Mojitos that i can't wait to try when the liqueur is ready in a few weeks! 

June at Last!

Happy June! Good riddance to May 2013!  It is usually my favorite month, but this year May has been so overabundant with rain it has caused a lot of headaches and delays--and even more problems for other, more serious farmers than we. This morning we had a few hours of sunshine (clouds have now moved in and more rain is in the forecast) so I celebrated by giving Gourdita a fresh new look.

Just need to get some flowers planted there for Gourdita to water. As you can see, the record rain in May has made everything very lush and verdant green.

But it has also made it almost impossible to do any planting. Here is our main garden, where Cadence optimistically transplanted  the tomato starts (mulched with straw) and peppers and potatoes a couple weeks ago - it rained heavily right after she planted and they have been  in standing water ever since.

The poor cows had been wallowing in mud in the sacrifice area and  mooing longingly at the yummy pasture across the fence. I am  down to only a few bales of hay and our neighbor told me the going rate is now up to $12 per small bale for nice hay! When  it dried off a bit I let the cows up in this pasture for a few days, but as you can see by the edge where they walk along the fence, they were really chewing it up with the ground so soft, so I had to close them out before they destroyed it.

Closing them out meant shutting this gate at the bottom of the hill. When I  ventured out to shut the gate I sank in mud up to my knees, past the tops of my muck boots.  As I tried to extricate myself I fell over and my arms were in mud up past my elbows. Nobody was home, and I did worry for a few minutes I might be stuck there all day, but ultimately I crawled out, covered in mud head to toe (and by mud, I mean a blend of slippery clay slurry fortified with cow manure.) I didn't take a self-portrait because I didn't want to even touch my camera.

Impossible to haul compost out of the cow yard or organic waste to the compost piles - the wheelbarrows cannot navigate the mud.

Great transplanting weather, though! Cadence dug out  a hundred or so weed-choked strawberry plants from the garden and I replanted them as a border bed in my  new bee/butterfly perennial garden. Perhaps with them being closer to the house we will get to the ripe berries before the  birds and rabbits do.

The picket fence around the bee and butterfly garden is lined with chicken wire to keep out the poultry.  Not the most beautiful, but it should be hidden as the plants grow taller.

Looking out of the perennial garden as another storm  passes... wasn't fast enough fetching the camera to catch the rainbow.

Our weekend music has been cancelled the past two weeks because of rain, and business at the farm store has been very slow, but that has given me time to set up new merchandise displays,  clean up the flower garden and plant the granary window box.

The best thing about this long rainy May is that we found morel mushrooms in our woods! We have searched every spring but only ever found one single morel. Here is  harvest from one suppertime walk, with a few spears of asparagus from the garden...

that we transformed into a yummy quiche with farm eggs and garden scallions.

We have also been enjoying rhubarb cake and sauce.

And  thankfully, the greens in the greenhouse are  doing well - without the high tunnel we never would have been able to supply the CSA boxes this week, our first week of the season.

In other news, Israel is learning to ride a bike (he never had one growing up in Mexico) thanks to our friend Stephanie handing down the perfectly-sized bicycle to him.

And the little lamb I pulled (!!!) while farm-sitting at Don and Betsy's is doing very well!

Making Jelly - It's Wild!

"Ever eat a pine tree? Some parts are edible." For some reason when I was  a kid, we thought that phrase by Euell Gibbons was so funny (it must have been from a television commercial.)    Now, as an adult, I  love Euell Gibbons' books and I enjoy foraging for wild foods.

I was reading Stalking the Wild Asparagus before bed the other night, the chapter where he raves about  sumac-elderberry jelly. It just happens to be peak season for both sumac berries and elderberries, so I decided to make some jelly last night.

It only took a few minutes to snip a  huge bowl of  sumac spikes. They are blooming prolifically at the edge of  our prairie - I didn't  even make a noticeable dent in the supply.

Rog had picked a  big basket of elderberries a couple days ago with the intent to make wine. Since he hasn't tackled that project yet, I claimed them.  The most tedious part of making this jelly is picking all the  little elderberries off the umbrell-shaped stems.  The stems are somewhat  toxic, so it is important to removes them carefully.
The elderberries are simmered and crushed to make the  juice (I used a potato masher,)  The sumac berries are prepared similarly.

The juices is are strained and combined in a pot, then brought to a boil.  A package of Sure Jell is added. When it comes to a boil again, 5 cups of sugar are added and stirred until dissolved,  then boiled for three minutes.  This bubbling,  delicious-smelling mixture is poured into clean jelly  jars,  sealed, and allowed to cool. That's all there is to it!

The color is a beautiful magenta.

We had the jelly on French bread toast for breakfast this morning. Yum! The sumac adds a sparkling touch of tartness to the elderberries.

I was planning to give my CSA members elderberries in their veggie boxes today, but  I figured they might appreciate finished jelly more - so they each got a jar.
I had enough of both juices left to make a second batch of jelly this afternoon. I might just make a third batch for future gifts.

Here is the recipe I used, from this website, that is very close to Euell Gibbons' instructions:

Sumac-Elderberry Jelly

2 cups elderberry juice

2 cups sumac juice

5 cups sugar

1 pkg. Sure-Jell (a commercially available jelly-making powder)

Prepare the elderberry juice by putting 2 quarts of elderberries and 2 cups of water in a suitable pot. Heat the mixture and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Mash the softened fruit, stir, and simmer for another 10 minutes. Strain the finished juice through several layers of cheesecloth (I use a very fine  metal sieve.)

The sumac juice is prepared in a similar manner. Take a gallon or so of the berry heads and put in a pot. Cover with water. Heat while stirring and mashing the berries. I do not heat this mixture to boiling, rather just enough to help get the most color and flavor from the berry heads. After about 10 minutes, remove from the stove and strain the juice to remove stems, seeds, and as many of the fuzzy little seed hairs as possible.

To make the jelly, heat 2 cups of the elderberry juice and 2 cups of the sumac juice in a large pot. As the mixture begins to boil, add 1 package of Sure-Jell (or other commercially available jelly-making compound) and mix thoroughly. Return the solution to a boil and add, while stirring, the 5 cups of sugar. Allow all this to boil for 3 minutes, stirring all the while to prevent sticking or scorching. After the 3 minutes have elapsed, remove from heat and ladle into sterilized 1/2-pint jelly jars. Have your lids and rings ready and screw on snuggly. Cover the capped jars with a light towel and allow them to self-seal.

Solar-Powered Syrup and Other Signs of Spring

The sap is running like crazy in our two  big silver maples.  We have collected over 20 gallons of sap from them in six 5-gallon buckets today.  Silver Maple sap is half as concentrated as Sugar Maple sap, so it takes 60 gallons to make one gallon of syrup. Silver maple syrup is very light, with a slight vanilla flavor. If we have two more days like this, we should be able to make a gallon of yummy maple syrup!

Two years ago we  boiled the syrup down on a wood fire. It turned out very smoky.  Last year, we boiled it down in a large  roasting pan over an LP gas tank flame--very costly for the fuel, but worked great.  This year, I am experimenting with an induction hot plate that purports to be 89% efficient (the heat heats only the pan, not the surrounding air.) Our electricity during daylight hours comes from twelve solar PV panels on the roof of our barn, so I guess we can call this solar syrup.  Rog has a Kill-a-Watt meter hooked up to determine the electricity usage of the induction hot plate  to verify whether it is really any more efficient. I like that we can set it at a specific temperature and it won't  boil over.  One downside, the pan is smaller than the large roaster we used before, so we can't boil as much at one time.

With warmer temps the  snow is melting fast and it is SO MUDDY. Not only does a large percentage of that mud get tracked into the house by  pets and people, it is kind of ugly out. So this afternoon, I spent hours power-washing the patio, and then  spreading pea gravel by the entrance, creating a mud buffer between driveway and house. This is the "after" photo. I think the last time that green metal patio furniture appeared in a blog post the snow was up to the table top!  Of course you can't see the two snowbanks I cropped out of the photo.

One reason it is so muddy is that in December they  trenched  all over the yard to connect the  solar panels to the  main power pole and to bring electricity to the granary. As the contractors were doing that, it was snowing heavily, so you can't entirely blame them, but now as it is melting there are sneaky, deep trenches under the snow. I cannot tell you how many times I have suddenly plunged into the  depths of a hidden  trench while innocently going out to feed the chickens.  It is also a major source of the incredible mud in our yard this spring.

Other  great  signs of spring: rhubarb is poking through!

The large purple drumstick alliums are poking through!

Apple tree buds are swelling!

And even a peony bud has burst through the ground!

Hallelujah! Spring is  almost here!